Business Agility

Business Agility covers using the technical agility delivered by virtualization and cloud computing to improve business agility, performance and results. This includes the agility derived from the proper implementation of Agile and DevOps methodologies, the agility derived from proper application and system architectures, ...

the agility derived from the proper implementation of Infrastructure as a Server (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) clouds, the agility derived from proper monitoring of the environment coupled with a process to resolve problems quickly, and the agility derived from have continuous availability through the use of high availability and disaster recovery products and procedures in place.

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What is still missing here is any kind of an end-to-end view of infrastructure latency that is also real time, deterministic and comprehensive. The marrying of the SAN point of view with the IP network point of view is the obvious combination. The hard issue here will be the identification of the applications so that these view of infrastructure performance can be surfaced on a per application basis. In summary, we have a long way to go here, and this just might be why so many of those virtualization projects for business critical and performance critical applications are having so much trouble getting traction.

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Security in the cloud and the virtual environment is ‘all about the data’ and not specifically about any other subsystem. It is about the data. As such the data has something it knows (the contents of the data), something it is (its signature), and something it has (its digital rights) and since it has these three elements, the data has all it has identity. However, protecting the data requires us to put things between the data and the real world such as firewalls, and complex role based access controls, as well as methods to replicate the data to other locations in a non-intrusive mechanism. The goal to such replication could be to ensure multiple sites have the same data (such as a hot-site) or to have the data available in another locations in case of disaster.

The Dell VIS stack (Advanced Infrastructure Manager, Self-Service Creator and Director) now represents the most functionally rich virtualization management offering on the market, as it is sourced from best of breed IT as a Service vendor DynamicOPS and best of breed self learning analytics vendor Netuitive. This stack backed up by Dell’s ability to sell into its customer base with whom Dell is already heavily interacting on the subject of virtualization puts Dell and it partners in a compelling position.

The announcement of CloudFoundry means the public declaration of full on war between VMware, and the two traditional OS vendors, Microsoft and Red Hat. Both traditional (not quite legacy yet) OS vendors are going to have to rapidly bolster their own PaaS cloud offerings. This will be a particular challenge for Microsoft as Microsoft has always gravitated strongly towards having a tightly integrated stack of software, and not being very open to open source frameworks like Spring, Ruby, and PHP.

Citrix’s annual Synergy conference held this week in San Francisco was kicked off with CEO Mark Templeton painting his view of the future, and the building and leveraging of cloud services. With the emergence and evolution of cloud services, Templeton believes that the industry has moved out of the PC (personal computing) era into a PC-3 era, incorporating personal, private, and public cloud services.

It is interesting to see Edward’s comment that according to EMC/VMware, widespread production deployment of Cloud Apps is 3-5 years off. If that is the case the VMware CloudFoundry initiative should be focused on cutting-edge development rather than porting existing apps, and in much the same way that Microsoft has always courted developers, CloudFoundry should be the latest cool thing for developer productivity. It’s interesting to talk about this stuff in the abstract, and at the strategic level, but sometimes it’s worth understanding what happens when you need to make the decisions for yourself.

Attempting to infer the performance of a database server by looking at resource utilization metrics will fail technically and organizationally. In a shared and dynamic environment, the only way to truly assess the performance of an element of the infrastructure or an application is to measure how long it is actually taking to do its job. This makes response time and its companion metric latency into the two most important metrics for virtualized and cloud based systems.

These announcements and ideas paint a better direction for cloud development and creation than there existed even one week ago. These announcements also concentrate on the data, not the computer engine(s) within the cloud. It has alwys been about the data.